News & Advice from DOC in a boxTopic: cold treatment

Once effective treatment or prevention exists for a disease, the hope is that the disease will fade from public health. But illnesses don’t always go away and can lurk in the shadows only to later re-emerge. Some of these diseases reappear because people fail to get vaccinated while others evolve to become more virulent and resistant to current treatment.

Person to Person

People with flu can spread it to others up to about 6 feet away. Most experts think that flu viruses spread mainly by droplets made when people with flu cough, sneeze or talk. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs. Less often, a person might get flu by touching a surface or object that has flu virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes.

For cold and flu-like symptoms, most consumers take over-the-counter medicines, while clinicians can prescribe antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu. But none of these is a silver bullet against the common cold or flu. Now, researchers have shown that elderberry syrup—a remedy as old as folklore—substantially reduces both symptom severity and symptom duration for colds and flu.

A recent analysis provides more evidence that inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics is common in the US. Researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA; and Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, analyzed prescription data on 19.2 million people.

Getting the flu vaccine is not only your best shot at beating the virus—it could help in other ways you may never have realized.

With flu season quickly gathering momentum, it’s not too late to get your shot to protect you through the remaining winter months. Last year’s flu season was long and brutal, the worst in 4 decades, with more than 80,000 flu or pneumonia-related deaths nationally.

As a parent, few things are more troubling than when your child gets sick. Because their immune systems are still developing, children can contract all kinds of illnesses. Fortunately, many of these diseases are common and easily treatable, especially if caught early on.